When is a desk not a desk? When it’s a status symbol | Gareth Rubin

The employers of the estate agent who sued them for unfair constructive dismissal would do well to read Machiavelli

Niccolo Machiavelli had an important piece of advice about office politics: If an injury has to be done to a man," he writes in The Prince, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared." Most of us can relate to that.

It's likely that whoever accidentally insulted Nicholas Walker, the take-no-prisoners manager of the Rickmansworth branch of Robsons Estate Agents, by giving him a second-rate desk, hadn't read Machiavelli's 1532 tract. Because Walker, no doubt thinking of Machiavelli's subsequent invocation - it is safer to be feared than loved because ... fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails" - immediately dragged his ashen-faced employers to an employment tribunal where he successfully sued them for unfair constructive dismissal. They probably really regret giving him that desk.

Holmes and Moriarty, the new authorised Sherlock Holmes novel by Gareth Rubin, is out now